As Chloe Young highlights below, the value of the data collected in your marketing automation or other marketing technology platforms can be crucial to your next sale. As Jeff Winter, Global Head of Marketing at Pitney Bowes points out - personalising these experiences leads to happy clients who in turn buy and recommend more.

A key consideration, and one that is often disconnected from the data gathering, is getting this information in front of the right people inside your organisation.

The fee earners at a professional services firms, or even the sales teams at a leading technology firms, do not require rows and rows of data. But they do need to know whether and how their target audience are engaging with their account-based marketing efforts.

Why? More than anything it is an efficient use of time. If a Sales person/fee earners hour is the equivalent of £700 and they are chasing prospects who are not showing the same level of interest as others, this becomes a huge opportunity cost. In addition, sharing the right information on who is engaging makes any selling process more efficient for an individual/firm (up selling, cross selling etc).

Depending the size of your firm you will have different technology available to execute this.

That said any B2B business can get started today! Simply by creating a regular newsletter and sending relevant content, created by your fee earners, sales, pre-sales etc to the right people. On sending this newsletter the service provider (Mailchimp, Campaign Monitor, Pardot, Eloqua etc) will send you a report on who opened which piece of content.

Put this list in front of the content contributors (fee earners, sales people etc) and others within the organisation. You can be sure it will stimulate sales activities and encouragement to write more content!

Interestingly there is also research indicating that people open emails based on who it is from. So you need to make sure the content is written by those your audience are actually speaking to in your firm.

Why not give this a go today and see instantly who is engaging with your firm, you might be surprised. Remember, it is not about the quantity but the quality of your audience. The fee earners/sales team will be able to tell you who the right people are...

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Creativity can pave the way for data-driven marketing and automation. By creating quality content, whether that’s through your company’s blog or even through social media platforms, such as LinkedIn groups or Twitter, you can gather important information about prospects, customers and advocates. Not only will you be able to identify where those people are and how to target them, but by encouraging them to download contact via filling in forms, you can capture essential details that will help you to create sales.
Creativity is a great way to capture interest and thus, ever more important data. Marketing shouldn’t be driven by one or the other, but should be informed by both creativity and data. By creating quality pieces that attract prospects and customers in the first place, you can analyse the data.